A Puritan Bohemia/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
Howard Stanton strode into the Assyrian room at the Art Museum. In one corner stood Anne, studying a relief. She turned and faced him.
"I see where you got your ideas of perspective," she remarked impertinently, pointing to the feet of an Assyrian king.
"Nannie," said the young man, "you have abused me too much to send me away now. You"
"Let's talk about the weather," suggested Anne.
"I should not speak of this again," he protested, "if I did not know that you really do care for me."
"I never said that I did not."
"Then why won't you accept the logical consequences?"
"Because I do not care enough. I know that my nature could be stirred more deeply."
"Are you quite sure?"
"Quite," Anne replied mendaciously. "Howard, will you do something for me?"
"Anything in the world."
"Change the subject."
"Oh," he said with regret. "That is the one thing in the world that I cannot do for you."
"Down under all your altruism," Anne remarked, "I detect the primal selfishness of man."
They were in the Early Greek room. Apollo looked down at them with his archaic smile.
"Moreover," Anne continued, "I am not sure of you."
"I should think that you might be sure by this time! " cried the young man hotly. "Will fifty years of waiting convince you better than twenty-five have done, of my steadfastness?"
"There has always been," said Anne impressively, "a kind of spiritual inconstancy about you. Ever since you were a boy your soul has fluttered from one ideal to another. You could never make a complete surrender to anything. Isn't this latest theory a kind of escape from complete devotion to your art? It seems to me an excuse for your temperament."
The young man grew pale.
"I've been pretty constant to one thing," he said. "My surrender to you has been too complete for my own good."
"That's the reason why I won't give up. One can be constant only to the unattainable. I don't wish to be numbered among your achievements."
"I consider that very feminine and very young," Howard remarked. "Haven't I worked pretty hard over my successive enthusiasms?"
"Yes," Anne admitted, "you have a strong will, only there is something behind it that—wobbles. Now I must go away. Mrs. Kent is waiting for me."
"I sha'n't forget that you said you like me."
"If I liked you enough," said Anne earnestly, "my whole soul and strength and devotion would go out to you. I should lose myself in you."
"The trouble with you, Nannie, is that you are clinging to the notion of some supernatural kind of love. You can't see the worth of the love you have. If you don't find the ideal in the actual, you won't find it at all."
"I wish you would carry that idea into your painting," Anne remarked, as she left the room.
"I wish you would carry your idea of painting into your life," retorted Howard.
Anne found Mrs. Kent standing by a cast of a Templar's tomb.
"What is the matter?" she asked when she saw the girl's face.
"Nothing; only, isn't life puzzling enough without mixing it up with love?"
"Puzzling? I thought you said that one could understand the whole by looking on."
"Nobody can understand anything," Anne remarked crossly.
"Why don't you give up?"
"Because," murmured the girl, touching the crossed feet of the warrior, "I haven't worked and planned and hoped for that all my life. I have something else to do."
"You might do your work better."
"Don't say that. It is commonplace, and besides, it isn't true. You can learn better by seeing and not sharing. Your feeling of the beauty and the worth and the hurt of things is all the keener for the sense of lack. What man wants is better in art than what man has."
"Queer sentiments for a realist," remarked Mrs. Kent.
"There is a kind of irony about the whole thing, if you are right. Those who have the experience can't use it in art, and those who pursue art haven't the experience. The two are indispensable and incompatible. Anyway, I am not like that."
"Like what?"
"The cold-blooded young woman who worships an art-ideal and crushes her heart. She never existed anyway outside of a story-book. I simply don't like Howard enough—for that."
The two friends were walking slowly through the great deserted rooms.
"How do you know?"
"If I did I should be satisfied. Love is the one thing in which there should be no doubts."
A queer look came into Mrs. Kent's face.
"That is very foolish. Do you mean that you, like the old novel-writers, think of love as one long, untroubled, mutual spasm?"
"I sha'n't tell," answered Anne, laughing.
"'He clasped her in his arms in one long ecstasy' no longer serves as a solution of that problem. Don't let a Fireside Companion ideal keep you from the happiness of your life."
"I've never seen the Fireside Companion," Anne remarked loftily.
"Neither have I," said Mrs. Kent with a smile. "Intellectual women are queer. You are twenty-seven years old, but in some ways you aren't seventeen. You must not carry a child's notion of absolute surety into the life of a grown-up woman."
"But I chose my work," persisted Anne. "I haven't time for luxuries."
"Love is not an indulgence," said Mrs. Kent severely. "It is a life-long battle. It is an agony, a doubt, a temptation, perhaps a triumph. It is no easy way of escape, but the hardest road, and the sweetest, that human feet can tread."
Anne's fingers reached out and touched the soft black veil.
"It is too hard," she whispered.
"No," said Mrs. Kent slowly, "it is not too hard. It is good to know the larger meanings of life, even if they must be learned with many tears. One learns all through love, except what has to be learned through death. It gives one the keys to everything, the lives of saints, the lives of sinful men and women too.
"Listen. When I was a girl I, too, was puzzled vaguely about everything. Then suddenly love came. But the old doubts haunted me, and the fear that love would slip away walked with me. Life was more bitter and life was more sweet because of love, and it was harder still to understand.
"I was married just three years. They were years of great joy and great pain. I used to say that I was in the corner of paradise that was hard by hell. Then a day came when they told me that my little child was dead. His father died next day.
"It was a bitter lesson. I am only now beginning to see that when one is too happy, or too unhappy, or both, to care about other people, God finds a way to make one care. Perhaps, if one learns only half of one's lesson in the morning, one is always set to learn the other half in the afternoon."
They left the Museum in silence. Outside, the frosty dust, blown high into the air, was turning gold-colour in the light of the sun. The one Florentine spire of the city stood gray against the sky. Through its delicate traceries shone the yellow of the west.
"It is because love is the surest way of forgetting one's self," said Mrs. Kent, "that I want you to know it. Marriage is self-abnegation"
"Marriage, as I have observed it, is mostly co-operative selfishness," interrupted Anne. "The trouble is, we are talking as if this were an abstract question. In reality there aren't any abstract questions, only individual problems. I cannot consent to marry the wrong man because marriage in general is a good thing!"
She looked reproachfully at Mrs. Kent, as they parted at the door of the studio building.
"Even you have deserted me. I've no one to stand by me but myself. I'm not an English princess; I'm not a favourite of the Sultan, and I won't be married unless I want to."
Anne climbed the stairs wearily. Once she stopped, and put her head down on the railing.
"Oh, I wish I did care!" she said, half aloud. "I wish I could!"